In many situations, actions or tasks available or required to be performed by a person depend on their location.
For example, in the case of parking a vehicle at a parking facility where payment is required for use of the facility, required actions comprise making the payment to register for parking and establishing that it has been paid.
Parking services have evolved significantly since the day of metered coin machines being the preferred method of registration and payment for a single or multiple number of parking bays.
Advancement to the systems and methods presently used to register and pay for parking, whether on street, in an undercover or open parking lot, or other facility, has largely been developed with the intention of automating the parking process.
Regarding indoor parking services, automated parking systems are in use in closed parking lots where a parking vehicle is registered and identified at an entrance and at an exit, typically barriered, of the facility.
The vehicle is traditionally detected via number plate recognition, unique keycard or disc identification presented by a driver of the vehicle, or via a more conventional method of the driver obtaining a ticket from a ticketing machine at the entrance and paying for the ticket prior to departure from the facility, for deposit at the exit.
Regarding outdoor parking services, in open parking lots without automated parking barriers, the most popular method of occupying and renting a parking bay is through “pay and display” ticketing. In this method, a ticket for parking is purchased from a ticket machine located within the parking lot and displayed on the vehicle's dashboard, with the date and expiry time visible, as evidence that the parking has been paid for.
There is prior art that takes advantage of the development and installation of parking sensory infrastructure within or around a parking bay or car park facility.
These systems are operable to detect and register presence of a parked vehicle within a parking bay space and then transmit real time parking data to a central management control unit which monitors the availability of a particular number of parking spaces. This unit will then convert the data into usable information which can be made available to an owner and/or manager of the parking facility and/or other users for reviewing parking availability and making instant payments.
The parking sensing infrastructure to be installed is disclosed as being in the form of kerb devices for off street parking, and in the form of parking sensor nodes or units for undercover or outdoor parking.
A limitation of systems implemented using such devices and units is that their installation and maintenance is often expensive, they can be a non-pleasing aesthetic to a parking area and thus often slow to be implemented and supported by government authorities and private car park owners. Furthermore, that may be prone to damage via vandalism, for example, leading to additional expense in protecting, repairing, and replacing them.
Optical digital recognition parking systems have been disclosed using optical digital recognition imaging operable to record number plate details of a vehicle when it enters a parking area.
The system is then operable to either bill the account of the preregistered vehicle owner, or send an account to the owner of the registered vehicle.
Other popular uses of this technology is with the detection, registration and charges that apply to vehicles that enter prescribed congestion zones in large cities such as London and New York.
Limitations of this technology include the required associated installation and maintenance of expensive infrastructure.
Furthermore, such systems may also not always account for all parking bays and areas, especially multiple small pockets of off street parking often found in urban areas. It is simply too expensive and unfeasible to account for it on a large scale.
Systems have been disclosed using radio frequency identification (RFID) tag technology. These technologies come in the form of keycards, keyfobs and dashboard parking discs, for example. They are popular and effective in enclosed parking areas and provide the additional benefit of the driver not having to take a ticket (or produce coins) upon entrance for processing prior to exit.
Typically, when the tag is first issued, it is preregistered with the vehicle owner's identification and billing information. A unique digital identification code is then registered against the tag by a respective car park management authority.
When the tag is used at entrance or exit of the car park, it records the date and time, which is then billed to the vehicle owner in accordance with the terms and conditions of the car park management authority.
Limitations of this technology include that it does not successfully account for off street parking, except for when RFID metal detectors are installed in each bay of such parking.
Furthermore, it is an expensive system and requires significant infrastructure installation and upkeep.
Cellular parking systems have also been disclosed, and are presently in use in areas where paid parking (usually ticketed with credit card or coin) is also available.
Such parking payment systems provide users the option of sending a communication such as a Short Message Service (SMS) text message or making a telephone call to management of the car park, providing their account (if preregistered) or car identification details, and that of the particular bay or parking lot/zone desired to be used. Their account is then charged or they transact via credit card in exchange for renting the parking area for the agreed time.
A main limitation of such systems is that due to manual registration, it can be time consuming (thus simply better to use pay and display ticketing) and it leaves the system open to error as the user may record their parking information incorrectly, thereby invalidating their parking.
An area that has lacked true advancement has been in developing the capability of offering real time information to users and managers/owners of a parking facility to confirm the availability, usage and trends of individual parking areas within the facility, without having to undergo the costly inconvenience of installing visual camera or sensory based infrastructure within the parking areas to gather and monitor parking data.
It is against this background that the present invention has been developed.